In case you need a refresher, we're talking about the pitfalls of small apartment ranges when using cast iron cookware. Definitely read the previous post for the start of this story, and I promise that when you get back to this entry, there will be better news.
So when we last left, I had just shown you the result of a pan reconditioning that did not take well at all. Why did this happen? There are a few reasons, not the least of which is my crappy stove. In fact, most of them have to do with my crappy stove. Rather than go into details about the stove itself, let me tell you what I did next to resolve the issue with the pan.
Again, I had to strip the pan down. I thought long and hard about what to do next with this pan, and about my own experiences with seasoning cookware from ages past. In fact, a quote from Star Trek III: The Search For Spock came to mind during my research:
"What you seek, has not been done since ages past! And then, only in legend!"
I'm afraid that when my mind is really trying to solve a problem, it often goes back to the beginning, and this turned out to be the best way to think in this situation. In this case, it was also a very geeky thought process.
Firstly, I needed to do more experiments with my stove. As I mentioned in Part 1, it is important to get a feel for your range before expecting to work miracles with it. I began by doing precisely what I mentioned last time: Using an oven thermometer to get a feel for how my oven actually is heating up, holding temperature, and if there were hotspots. Indeed there were. My oven heats to a higher temperature on the sides, particularly the left side, and is hotter at the top of the oven than in the center. My oven also takes more than 35 minutes to heat up, and when it does, it is often hotter than what the dial says. When I open it, the heat that escapes seems to not affect the right side of the oven, and it takes about 20 minutes to heat up a second time.
Next, I tested how hot my burners get, though not through any scientific method such as an infrared thermometer. I used my wok, oddly enough. Now I know what you are thinking:
How can she use the wok to test how hot the burners make a pan compared to the oven?
The answer isn't precise, but the theory bore out in the end. I used my wok in conjunction with the oil I was using to treat the pan. My cast iron skillet, right out of the (supposed 550 degree) oven, when coated with a light coating of vegetable oil, creates no smoke whatsoever, even though in theory, the smoke point of the oil should be well surpassed at this point. To be clear, I'd left the pan in the oven for about 45 minutes before testing it.
The wok, which is really a stir-fry pan, would cause the oil to smoke almost instantly when the pan had been on the burner for less than 5 minutes. When applying this test to the poorly mottled cast iron skillet, I found that not only did this hold true, but when looking at the surface of the pan, I also found that the pan did not heat evenly on the burner as it appears to in all the pan seasoning tutorials I've read.
Yes, I may have interpreted those tutorials too literally, but these experiments really paid off. When I stripped my pan down a second time and prepared to season it, a theory popped into my head about the initial seasoning of my wok, and how I developed a patina on it that was slicker than... well it was anti-stick, let's just say. So the approach I took to the pan this time was to dry it off in the oven again, and then crank the oven up as I had before with the bare pan in it, and then remove the pan to a burner set to high. After about 6 minutes of this, I wiped the pan down with a coating of oil to cover the entire surface, let it brown, and then move the pan around the burner so all areas of the cooking surface became heated evenly. Once the oil stopped glistening (and smoking too, for that matter), I repeated the process. I did this about 6 times before I put the pan back in the oven, upside down, with a sheet pan below it to catch any drippings, and turned the oven off.
My results were astoundingly different. This method gave me an incredibly smooth black patina that I have been building up ever since, which looked like this after the pan cooled from the first round of seasoning:
So what else did I do differently? I used vegetable oil with a high canola oil ratio (regular canola oil will work too) this time, instead of what some other blogs recommended (everything from lard, to generic vegetable shortening, to olive oil). When I'd seasoned my wok, I used sesame oil, which has a very high smoke point, well above that of canola (as I seem to recall, I'm sure someone will correct me on this if I am wrong). In fact, now whenever I coat the pan, the oil only smokes for a moment, and then it clears up. With the mottled pan from Part 1, the pan would smoke once it got hot, no matter how baked in the oil appeared to be.
Again, what I sought had been done in ages past: The method of creating a patina that worked on my wok, worked on my cast iron skillet as well. I have to say that I'm thrilled, and I continue to break it in with everything from bacon to burgers. When I feel the surface is just right, I'll give it the fried egg test. I'll let you know how that goes. In the meantime, that's the end of this chapter, and I hope you've all enjoyed reading it as much as I have enjoyed writing it. Until next time:
Happy cooking!
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